Pale Male and Fledglings in Central Park with the NY Philharmonic and Part 2 of the Little Brown Bat

All Fledgling Hawk Photos by Stella Hamilton
Once again Stella Hamilton put on her Central Park hiking shoes and tracked down as many of the 927 Fifth Avenue family as she could find.

5:42PM Eating a rat that was delivered at 1pm according to hawk watchers.
 I am a little concerned about a rat that was delivered at 1PM unless it had been caught earlier and cached.  A midday appearing rat makes me nervous.

 5:46 PM Almost done with rat.

5:50 PM  Fledgling leaves some rat leftovers on limb.  Portion too big I guess.

Note that the fledgling at this age has learned to cache the leftovers as opposed to just leaving them on the ground as she may have at a younger age.

6:59PM  Fledgling digests rat on Cedar Hill tree.

7:47PM  Pale Male roosting early?  New York Philharmonic in the park tonight.  Too crowded and noisy.

Or Pale Male has decided he has a great seat for the concert and doesn't want to loose it. :)

Seriously though as Pale Male is an old hand at Central Park Brouhaha he would have noticed set up for the concert early this morning, (which also may have flushed the 1:00PM rat out early, that's a relieving thought) and therefore with increased prey available he hunted early then all could be battened down by the time the many many many people arrived for the free concert of the New York Philharmonic.

Thanks Stella!

       Next Up the Sick Little Brown Bat.

11:30PM  When last we saw Little Brown Bat he had crawled out of his roost onto the roof of the broken bird house and was looking flat, dehydrated, and singularly unwell

Oh dear!

 I touched his chin with the saucer...his head went up and his cute little teeth appeared.  Excellent he's responding.

 At this point I realized that as I was holding the saucer in my left hand and my camera in my right, that I might just accidentally douse him.  So I dumped the camera. Squatted down and tipped the saucer a bit, got a great view of his little vampiric looking canines and he had a nice long drink.
EXCELLENT! 

Then the mailman appeared...a little taken aback at first.  I explained the situation and asked him to try giving bat some water so I could get a picture of him drinking.  The bat not the mailman. 

 Bat evidentally had had enough or he didn't like the mailman's technique.   Good effort at any rate. 

 I note that little brown bat has his eyes open. Mailman then goes about his appointed rounds. See his whiskers? The bat's not the mailman's.

Digression 1- Some may ask why I didn't use an eyedropper to give Bat some water.  Well when I looked up bats to identify him, I ran across the factoid that in some areas one out of every 200 bats may be rabid and though rabid bats don't attack you like some rabid animals do, better to have one's flesh a little further away to avoid saliva.

Digression 2-  After Bat drank the water I felt that reduced the possibility of his having rabies.  As what is one technical name for rabies?  Hydrophobia-fear of water.  But then again as bats aren't dogs or people, perhaps they don't get the "fear of water" symptom.

Digression 3-Why are those extremely hot miserable summer days called "dog days"?  Because back in the day before rabies vaccine it was thought those were the days when rabid dogs would most likely appear.

 Time for some food.  But what?  I'd looked him up the day before out of curiosity and yes, Little Brown Bat is his actual common name, and he is an aquatic insect eater.

Cat or dog chow as emergency food?  As some animals react badly to the hyper protein content of cat food, for the first meal I'll go for dog food.

Having no wet animal food I nabbed the dog chow and put a couple pieces in water to soak.  What to dispense it with?  I start digging around and Ah HA!...I find the longish chopsticks my parents got when they were in Hong Kong in early 1962.  (Be careful what you throw away you just may need it to feed a bat...)

I crush the soggy dog chow, stick a glob on the chopstick, and  nudge Little Bat's mouth.  He opens his mouth to hiss, great look at those little vampire canines, I gently nudge his mouth again and he takes the blob into his mouth and starts chewing.

Wow!  He seems to like it.  Chomp, chomp, chomp.  More?  No.

I go inside, grab my phone,  and try to get a hold of a rehabber.  No answer.  I leave a message.

When I come back out...

 No BAT!!!

 Something wiggles behind the bird house!

It's little bat!

He's pulling his body up with the crook in his wing on the bird house for leverage....

Stay tuned for Part 3!

Donegal Browne